WE were amazed at the difference in Chungking. This was no longer the Chungking that we knew. New buildings—new fronts to old buildings—shops of all types springing up everywhere. Chungking! The place was absolutely crowded! People had been pouring in from Shanghai, from all the coastal towns. Businessmen, with their living gone on the coast, had come far inland to Chungking, to start all over again, perhaps with a few pitiful remnants saved from the grasping Japanese. But more often starting again from nothing.
Universities had found buildings in Chungking, or had built their own temporary buildings, ramshackle sheds most of them. But here was the seat of culture of China. No matter what the buildings were like, the brains were there, some of the best brains in the whole world.
We made our way to the temple at which we had stayed previously; it was like coming home. Here, in the calm of the temple, with the incense waving in clouds above our heads, we felt that we had come to peace, we felt that the Sacred Images were gazing benignly upon us in favour of our efforts, and perhaps even a little sympathetic at the harsh treatment which we had undergone. Yes, we were home at peace, recovering from our hurts, before going out into the fierce savage world to endure fresh and worse torments. The temple bells chimed, the trumpets were sounded. It was time again for the familiar, well beloved service. We took our places with hearts full of joy at being back.
That night we were late in retiring because there was so much to discuss, so much to tell, so much to hear as well, because Chungking had been having a hard time with the bombs dropping. But we were from "the great outside," as they called it in the temple, and our throats were parched before we were allowed to roll again in our blankets and sleep in the old familiar place upon the ground near the temple precincts. At last sleep overtook us.
In the morning I had to go to the hospital at which I had previously been student, house surgeon, and then medical officer. This time I was going as a patient. It was a novel experience indeed to be a patient at this hospital. My nose, though, was giving trouble; it had turned septic, and so there was nothing for it but to have it opened and scraped. This was quite a painful process. We had no anesthetics. The Burman Road had been closed, all our supplies had been stopped. There was nothing for it but to endure as pleasantly as I could, that which could not be avoided. But so soon as the operation was over I returned to the temple, because beds in Chungking hospital were very scarce. Wounded were pouring in, and only the most urgent cases, only those who could not walk at all were allowed to remain in the hospital. Day after day I made the journey down the little path, along the highroad, to Chungking. At long last, after two or three weeks, the Dean of the Surgical Facility called me into his office, and said, “Well, Lobsang, my friend, we shall not have to engage thirty-two coolies for you after all. We thought we should, you know, it has been touch and go!”
Funerals in China are taken very, very seriously indeed. It was considered of the utmost importance to have the correct number of bearers according to one's social status. To me it all seemed silly, as I well knew when the spirit had left the body it did not matter at all what happened to the body. We of Tibet made no fuss about our discarded bodies; we just had them collected by the Body Breakers who broke them up and fed the bits to the birds. Not so in China. Here that would be almost akin to condemning one to eternal torment. Here one had to have a coffin borne by thirty-two coolies if it was a first class funeral. The second class funeral, though, had just half that number of bearers, sixteen of them, as if it took sixteen men to carry one coffin! The third class funeral—this was about the average—had eight coolies bearing the lacquered wooden coffin. But the fourth class, which was just the ordinary working class, had four coolies. Of course the coffin here would be quite a light affair, quite cheap. Lower than fourth class had no coolies at all to carry. The coffins were just trundled along in any sort of conveyance. And of course there were not only coolies to be considered; there were the official mourners, those who wept and wailed, and made it their life’s work to attend on the departure of the dead.
Funerals? Death? It is strange how odd incidents stay in one's mind! One in particular has stayed in mine ever since. It occurred near Chungking. It may be of interest to relate it here, to give a little picture of war—and death.
It was the day of the mid-autumn festival of “The Fifteenth Day of the Eighth Month” when the autumn moon was at the full. In China this is an auspicious occasion. It is the time when families try their utmost to come together for a banquet at the ending of the day. “Moon-cakes” are eaten to celebrate the harvest moon; they are eaten as a sort of sacrifice as a sort of token that they hope the next year will be a happier one.
My friend Huang the Chinese monk was also staying at the temple. He too had been wounded and on this particular day we were walking from Chiaoting Village to Chungking. The village is a suburb perched high on the steep sides of the Yangtse. Here lived the wealthier people, those who could afford the best. Below us through occasional gaps in the trees as we walked we could see the river and the boats upon it. Nearer in the terraced gardens blue-clad men and women worked, bent over at their eternal weeding and hoeing. The morning was beautiful. It was warm and sunny, the type of day when one feels glad to be alive, the type of day when everything seems bright and cheerful. Thoughts of war were far removed from our minds as we strolled along, stopping every so often to look through the trees and admire the view. Close to us in a nearby thicket a bird was singing, welcoming the day. We walked on and breasted the hill. “Stop a minute, Lobsang. I'm winded,” said Huang. So we sat on a boulder in the shadow of the trees. It was pleasant there with the beautiful view across the water, with the moss covered track sweeping away down the hill, and the little autumn flowers peeping from the ground in profuse flecks of colour. The trees, too, were beginning to turn and change shade. Above us little flecks of cloud drifted idly across the sky.
In the distance approaching us we saw a crowd of people. Snatches of sound were borne to us on the light wind. “We must conceal ourselves, Lobsang. It is the funeral of old Shang, the Silk Trader. A first class funeral. I should have attended, but I said I was too ill, and I shall lose face if they see me now.” Huang had risen to his feet, and I rose as well from the boulder. Together we retreated a little way into the wood, where we could see, but not be seen. There was a rocky ridge, and we lay down behind it, Huang a little way behind me so that even if I were seen he would not be. We made ourselves at ease, draping our robes around us, robes which blended well with the russet of autumn.
Slowly the funeral procession approached, the Chinese monks were gowned in yellow silk, with their rust red capes around their shoulders. The pale autumn sun shone on their freshly shaven heads, showing up the scars of the initiation ceremony; the sun gleamed on the silver bells they carried in their hands, making flashings and glintings as they were swung. The monks were singing the minor chant of the funeral service as they walked ahead of the huge Chinese lacquered coffin which was carried by thirty-two coolies. Attendants beat gongs, and let off fire-works to scare any lurking devils for, according to Chinese belief, demons were now ready to seize the soul of the deceased, and they had to be frightened off by fireworks and by noise. Mourners, with the white cloth of sorrow draped around their heads, walked behind. A woman, far advanced in pregnancy, and evidently a close relation, was weeping bitterly as she was helped along by others. Professional mourners wailed loudly as they shrieked the virtues of the departed to all who listened. Next came servants bearing paper money, and paper models of all the things which the deceased had in this life, and would need in the next. From where we watched, concealed by the ridge of rock and the overgrowing bushes, we could smell the incense and the scent of the freshly crushed flowers as they were trodden underfoot by the procession. It was a very big funeral indeed. Shang, the Silk Trader, must have been one of the leading citizens, for the wealth here was fabulous.
The party came slowly by us with loud wailings, and the clattering of cymbals, and the blaring of instruments and the ringing of bells. Suddenly shadows came across the sun, and above the clamour of the funeral party we heard the drone of high-powered aero engines, a drone growing louder, and louder, and more and more ominous. Three sinister-looking Japanese planes came into view above the trees, between us and the sun. They circled around. One detached itself, and came lower, and swept right above the funeral procession. We were not perturbed. We thought that even the Japanese would respect the sanctity of death. Our hearts rose as the plane swept back to rejoin the other two, and together they made off. Our rejoicing was short-lived however; the planes circled, and came at us again; little black dots fell from beneath their wings, and grew larger, and larger, as the shrieking bombs fell to earth, fell directly on the funeral procession.
Before us the trees swayed and rocked, the whole earth appeared to be in turmoil, riven metal went screaming by. So close were we that we heard no explosion. Smoke and dust and shattered cypress trees were in the air. Red lumps went swishing by, to land with sickening splats on anything in the way. For a moment all was hidden by a black and yellow pall of smoke. Then it was swept away by the wind and we were left to face the ghastly carnage.
On the ground the coffin gaped wide, and empty. The poor dead body which it had contained was flung asprawl, like a broken doll, shredded, unkempt, discarded. We picked ourselves from the ground, shaken, and half stunned by the havoc, by the violence of the explosion and by our very close escape. I stood and picked from the tree behind me a long sliver of metal which had barely missed me as it whirred by my head. The sharp end was dripping with blood, and it was hot, so hot that I dropped it with an exclamation of pain as I looked ruefully at my scorched finger tips.
On the rended trees pieces of cloth stirred in the breeze, cloth with bloody flesh adhering. An arm, complete with shoulder, still swayed across a forked branch some fifty feet away. It teetered, slipped, caught again for a moment on a lower branch, and then finally, sickeningly fell to the earth. From somewhere a red, distorted head, grinning frightened surprise, fell through the stripped branches of the trees, and rolled towards me, to finally stop at my feet as if it were gazing at me in awed wonder at the inhumanity of the Japanese aggressor.
It seemed a moment when even time itself stood still in horror. The air reeked with the odors of high explosive, with blood, and with riven guts. The only sounds were swish and plop, as unmentionable things fell from the sky or from the trees. We hurried to the wreckage, hoping that someone could be helped, sure that there must be some survivor of the tragedy. Here was a body, shredded and disemboweled, so mutilated, so scorched that we could not say if it was male or female; so mutilated that we could hardly say even that it was human. By it, across it, was a small boy, with his legs blown off at the thigh. He was whimpering with terror. As I knelt beside him he erupted a gout of bright blood, and coughed his life away. Sadly we looked about, and widened our area of search. Beneath a fallen tree we found the pregnant woman. The tree had been blown across her. It had burst her stomach. From the womb her unborn baby protruded, dead. Further along was a severed hand which still tightly grasped a silver bell. We searched and searched, and found no life.
From the sky came the sound of aircraft engines. The attackers were returning to view their ghastly work. We lay back on the blood-stained ground as the Japanese plane circled lower, and lower, to inspect the damage, to make sure that none lived to tell the tale. It turned lazily, banking like a hawk swooping for the kill, then came back, back in straight flight, lower and lower. The harsh crackle of machine-gun fire and the whiplash of bullets along the trees. Something tugged at the skirt of my robe and I heard a scream. I felt as if my leg had been scorched. “Poor Huang,” I thought, “he's hit and he wants me.” Above us the plane turned circling idly as if the pilot leaned as far as he could to view the ground below. He put his nose down and desultorily fired again and again, and circled once more. Apparently he was satisfied for he waggled his wings and went away. After a while I rose to give aid to Huang but he was many feet away, quite unhurt, still half consealed in the ground. I pulled my robe and found my left leg had a scorch mark where the bullet had ploughed its way along the flesh. Inches from me the grinning skull now had a fresh bullet hole through it, straight through one temple and out through the other side; the exit hole was huge and had blown the brains out with it.
Once again we searched in the undergrowth and among the trees, but there was no sign of life. Fifty to a hundred people, perhaps more, had been here only minutes ago to pay homage to the dead. Now they too were dead. Now they were merely red ruin and shapeless mounds. We turned helplessly. There was nothing at all for us to do, nothing to save. Time alone would cover these scars.
This then was the “Fifteenth Day of the Eighth Month” when families came together at the ending of the day, when they came together with joy in their hearts at the reunion. Here at least, by the action of the Japanese, the families had “come together” at the ending of their day. We turned to continue our way; as we left the wrecked area a bird took up its interrupted song as if nothing at all had happened.
Life in Chungking at that time was crude indeed. Many money-grabbers had come in, people who tried to exploit the misery of the poor, who tried to capitalize on war. Prices were soaring, conditions were difficult. We were glad indeed when orders came through for us to resume our duties. Casualties near the coast had been very high indeed. Medical personnel were desperately needed. So once again, we left Chungking, and made our way down to the coast where General Yo was waiting to give us our orders. Days later I was installed as medical officer in charge of the hospital, a laughable term indeed. The hospital was a collection of paddy fields in which the unfortunate patients lay on the water-logged ground, for there was nowhere else to lie, no bed, nothing. Our equipment? Paper bandages. Obsolete surgical apparatus, and anything else we could make, but at least we had the knowledge and the will to bring help to those so badly wounded and of those we had a surfeit. The Japanese were winning everywhere. The casualties were ghastly.
One day the air-raids seemed to be more intense than usual. Bombs were dropping everywhere. The whole fields were ringed with bomb craters. Troops were retreating. Then in the evening of that day a contingent of Japanese rushed upon us, menacing us with their bayonets, jabbing first one, then another, just to show that they were the masters. We had no resistance, we had no weapons at all, nothing with which to defend ourselves. The Japanese roughly questioned me as the one in charge, and then they went out in the fields to examine the patients. All the patients were ordered to stand up. Those who were too ill to walk and carry a load were bayoneted by the enemy then and there. The rest of us were marched off, just as we were, to a prison camp much further in the interior. We marched miles and miles each day. Patients were dropping dead by the roadside, and as they fell Japanese guards rushed to examine them for anything of value. Jaws clenched in death were pried open with a bayonet, and any gold fillings of teeth were crudely knocked out.
One day as we were marching along I saw that the guards in front had something strange on the end of their bayonets. They were waving them about. I thought it was some sort of celebration. It looked as if they had got balloons tied on the end of their rifles. Then, with laughs and shouts, guards came rushing down the line of prisoners, and we saw with a sick feeling in the stomach, that they had heads spiked to the end of their bayonets. Heads with the eyes open, the mouth open, too, the jaws dropped down. The Japanese had been taking prisoners, decapitating them and spearing the necks as a sign—again—that they were the masters.
In our hospital we had been dealing with patients of all nations. Now, as we marched along, bodies of all nationalities were by the roadside. They were all of one nationality now, the nation of the dead. The Japanese had taken everything from them. For days we marched on, getting fewer and fewer, getting tireder, and tireder, until those few of us who reached the new camp were stumbling along in a red haze of pain and fatigue, with the blood seeping through our rag-wrapped feet, and leaving a long red trail behind us. At last we reached the camp, and a very crude camp it was too. Here again the questioning started. Who was I? What was I? Why was I, a lama of Tibet, fighting on behalf of the Chinese? My reply to the effect that I was not fighting, but mending broken bodies, and helping those who were ill, brought abuse and blows. “Yes,” they said, “yes, mending bodies so that they can fight against us.”
At last I was put to work looking after those who were ill, trying to save them for the slave labor of the Japanese. About four months after we reached that camp there was a big inspection. Some high officials were coming to see how the prison camps were behaving, and whether there was anyone of note who could be of use to the Japanese. We were all lined up in the early dawn, and left standing there for hours, and hours, until the late afternoon, and a sorry crowd we looked by then. Those who fell from fatigue were bayoneted and dragged away to the death pile. We straightened our lines somewhat as high-powered cars drove up with a roar, and bemedalled men jumped out. A visiting Japanese major casually walked down the lines, looking over the prisoners. He glanced at me, then looked at me more carefully. He stared at me, and said something to me which I did not understand. Then as I did not reply he struck me across the face with the scabbard of his sword, cutting the skin. Quickly an orderly ran up to him. The major said something to him. The orderly ran off to the records office, and after a very short time he came back with my record. The major snatched it from him and read it avidly. Then he shouted abuse at me and issued an order to the guards with him. Once again I was knocked down by their rifle butts. Once again my nose—so newly repair and rebuilt—was smashed and I was dragged away to the guard room. Here my hands and feet were tied behind my back, and pulled up and tied to my neck, so that every time I tried to rest my arms I nearly strangled myself. For a long time I was kicked and pummeled, and burned with cigarette ends while questions were shot at me. Then I was made to kneel, and guards jumped on my heels in the hope that that pain would compel me to answer. My arches snapped under the strain.
The questions they asked! How had I escaped? Who had I spoken to while I was away? Did I know that it was an insult to their Emperor to escape? They also demanded details of troop movements because they thought that I, as a lama from Tibet, must know a lot about Chinese dispositions. Of course I did not answer, and they kept on burning me with their lighted cigarettes, and going through all the usual routine of torture. Eventually they put me on a crude sort of rack, and pulled the drum tight so that it felt as if my arms and legs were being dragged from their sockets. I fainted and each time I was revived by having a bucket of cold water thrown over me, and by being pricked with bayonet points. At last the medical officer in charge of the camp intervened. He said that if I had any more suffering I would assuredly die, and they would then not be able to get answers to their questions. They did not want to kill me, because to kill me would be to allow me to escape from their questions. I was dragged out by the neck, and thrown into a deep underground cell shaped like a bottle, made of cement. Here I was kept for days, it might have been weeks. I lost all count of time, there was no sensation of time. The cell was pitch dark. Food was thrown in every two days, and water was lowered in a tin. Often it was spilled, and I had to grovel in the dark, and scrabble with my hands to try and find it, or to try and find anything moist from the ground. My mind would have cracked under the strain, under that darkness so profound, but my training saved me. I thought again of the past.
Darkness? I thought of the hermits in Tibet, in their secure hermitages perched in lofty mountain peaks in inaccessible places among the clouds. Hermits who were immured in their cells, and stayed there for years, freeing the mind of the body, freeing the soul from the mind, so that they could realize greater spiritual freedom. I thought not of the present, but of the past, and during my reverie inevitably came back to that most wonderful experience, my visit to the Chang Tang Highlands.
We, my Guide, the Lama Mingyar Dondup, and a few companions and I, had set out from the golden roofed Potala in Lhasa in search of rare herbs. For weeks we had journeyed upwards ever upwards into the frozen North into Chang Tang Highlands, or, as some call it, Shamballah. This day we were nearing our objective. That day was indeed bitter, the bitterest of many frozen days. Ice blew at us driven by a shrieking gale. The frozen pellets struck our flapping robes, and abraded the skin from any surface which was left exposed. Here, nearly twenty-five thousand feet above the sea, the sky was a vivid purple, few patches of cloud racing across were startling white in comparison. It looked like the white horses of the Gods, taking their riders across Tibet.
We climbed on, and on, with the terrain becoming more difficult with every step. Our lungs rasped in our throats. We clawed a precarious foothold in the hard earth, forcing our fingers into the slightest crack in the frozen rock. At last we reached that mysterious fog belt again (see Third Eye) and made our way through it with the ground beneath our feet becoming warmer, and warmer, and the air around us becoming more and more balmy and comforting. Gradually we emerged from the fog into the lush paradise of that lovely sanctuary. Before us again was that land of a bygone age.
That night we rested in the warmth and comfort of the Hidden Land. It was wonderful to sleep on a soft bed of moss, and to breathe the sweet scent of flowers. Here in this land there were fruits which we had not tasted before, fruits which we sampled, and tried again. It was glorious too, to be able to bathe in warm water, and to loll at ease upon a golden strand.
On the following day we journeyed onward, going higher and higher, but now we were not at all troubled. We marched on through clumps of rhododendron, and passed by walnut trees, and others the names of which we did not know. We did not press ourselves unduly that day. Night fall came upon us once again, but this time we were not cold. We were at ease, comfortable. Soon we sat beneath the trees, and lit our fire, and prepared our evening meal. With that completed we wrapped our robes about us and lay and talked. One by one we dropped off to sleep.
Again on the next day we continued our march, but we had only covered two or three miles when suddenly, unexpectedly, we came to an open clearing, a spot where the trees ended, and before us—we stopped almost paralyzed with amazement, shaking with the knowledge that we had come upon something completely beyond our understanding. We looked. The clearing before us was a vast one. There was a plain before us, more than five miles across. At its distant side there was an immense sheet of ice extending upwards, like a sheet of glass reaching toward the heavens, as if indeed it were a window on heaven, a window on the past. For at the other side of that sheet of ice we could see, as if through the purest of water, a city, intact, a strange city, the like of which we had never seen even in the books of pictures which we had at the Potala.
Projecting from the glacier were buildings. Most of them were in a good state of preservation, because the ice had been thawed out gently in the warm air of the hidden valley, thawed out so gently, so gradually that not a stone or part of a structure had been damaged. Some of them, indeed, were quite intact, preserved throughout countless centuries by the wonderful pure dry air of Tibet. Some of those buildings in fact, could have been erected perhaps a week before, they looked so new.
My Guide, the Lama Mingyar Dondup, broke our awed silence, saying, "My brothers, half a million years ago this was the home of the Gods. Half a million years ago this was a pleasant seaside resort in which lived scientists of a different race and type. They came from another place altogether, and I will tell you of their history one day; but through their experiments they brought calamity upon the earth, and they fled the scene of their disaster leaving the ordinary people of the earth behind. They caused calamity, and through their experiments the sea rose up and froze, and here before us we see a city preserved in the eternal ice from that time, a city which was inundated as the land rose and the water rose with it, inundated and frozen."
We listened in fascinated silence as my Guide continued with his talk, telling us of the past, telling us of the ancient records far beneath the Potala, records engraved upon sheets of gold, just as now in the Western world records are preserved for posterity in what they called “time capsules”.
Moved by a common impulse we rose to our feet and then walked to explore the buildings within our reach. The closer we got, the more dumbfounded we became. It was so very very strange. For a moment we could not understand the sensation that we felt. We imagined that we had suddenly become dwarfs. Then the solution hit us. The buildings were immense, as if they were built for a race twice as tall as we. Yes, that was it. Those people, those super-people, were twice as tall as ordinary people of earth. We entered some of the buildings, and looked about. One in particular seemed to be a laboratory of some kind, and there were many strange devices, and many of them still worked.
A gushing current of ice cold water jerked me back to reality with stunning suddenness, jerked me back to the misery and pain of my existence in the stone oubliette. The Japanese had decided that I had been in there long enough, and I had not been “softened up” enough. The easiest way to get me out, they thought, was to fill the oubliette with water, so that I would float to the surface as a cork floats to the surface of a filled bottle. As I reached the top, reached the narrow neck of the cell, rough hands grabbed me and dragged me out. I was marched off to another cell, this time to one above ground, and flung in.
The next day I was put to work, again treating the sick. Later that week there was another inspection by the high Japanese officials. There was much rushing about. The inspection was being carried out without any previous warning and the guards were in a panic. I found myself at the time quite near the main gate of the prison. No one was taking any notice of me so I took the opportunity to keep walking, not too fast, as I did not want to attract attention but not too slow either, it was not healthy to linger there! I kept walking, and walking, as if I had a perfect right to be out. One guard called to me, and I turned toward him and raised my hand, as if in salute. For some reason he just waved back and turned about his ordinary work. I continued with my walk. When I was out of sight of the prison, hidden by the bushes, I ran as fast as my weakened frame would enable me.
A few miles further on, I recollected, was a house owned by Western people whom I knew. I had, in fact, been able to do them some service in the past. So, cautiously, by nightfall, I made my way to their home. They took me in with warm exclamations of sympathy. They bandaged my many hurts and gave me a meal and put me to bed, promising that they would do everything they could to get me through the Japanese lines. I fell asleep, soothed by the thought that once again I was in the hands of friends.
Rough shouts and blows soon brought me back to reality, soon jerked me back from sleep. Japanese guards were standing over me, dragging me out of the bed, prodding me again with their bayonets. My hosts, after all their protestations of sympathy, had waited until I was asleep and had then notified the Japanese guards that they had an escaped prisoner. The Japanese guards had lost no time in coming to collect me. Before I was taken away I managed to ask the Western people why they had so treacherously betrayed me. Their illuminating answer was, “You are not one of us. We have to look after our own people. If we kept you we should antagonize the Japanese, and endanger our work.”
Back in that prison camp I was treated very badly indeed. For hours I was strung up from the branches of a tree, suspended by my two thumbs tied together. Then there was a sort of mock trial in front of the commandant of the camp. He was told, “This man is a persistent escaper. He is causing us too much work.” So he passed sentence on me. I was knocked down and laid out on the ground. Then blocks were put beneath my legs so that my legs were supported clear of the ground. Two Japanese guards stood on each leg, and bounced, so that the bone snapped. I fainted with the agony of it. When I recovered consciousness I was back in the cold, dank, cell, with the rats swarming around me.
It was death not to attend the pre-dawn roll-call, and I knew it. A fellow prisoner brought me some bamboos, and tied splints to each leg to support the broken bones. I used two other bamboos as crutches, and I had a third which I used as a sort of tripod leg in order to balance. With that I managed to attend the roll-call, and so saved myself from death by hanging, or bayoneting, or disembowelling, or any other of the usual forms in which the Japanese specialized.
As soon as my legs were healed and the bones knit together—although not very well, as I had set them myself—the commandant sent for me, and told me that I was going to be moved to a camp yet further into the interior, where I was to be medical officer of this camp for women. So, once again, I was on the move. This time there was a convoy of lorries going to the camp and I was the only prisoner being moved there. So I was just ordered aboard and kept chained like a dog near the tail board of one lorry. Eventually, several days later, we arrived at this camp where I was taken off and led to the commandant.
Here we had no medical equipment of any kind, and no drugs. We made what we could from old tins sharpened on stones, from fire-hardened bamboo, and from threads unraveled from tattered clothing. Some of the women had no clothing at all, or were very ragged. Operations were performed on conscious patients, and torn bodies were stitched with boiled cotton. Often by night the Japanese would come along and order out all women to inspect them. Any which they found to their liking they took off to the officers' quarters to entertain the permanent officers and any visitors. In the morning the women would be returned looking shamefaced, and ill, and I as the prisoner-doctor would have to try to patch up their maltreated bodies.
|
Yüklə 0.71 Mb.